dissertation-free research

Oh, and to answer one of your other questions, cold-emailing COULD work, but your emails might get caught in spam filters (or get filtered as spam manually by someone not paying much attention.) I get a few emails a month from random people around the world that seem to be mass mails sent to every academic on our university's website, begging for stipends, fellowships or paid employment. People learn to filter these or press delete very fast. The other thing that would work would be to apply for your own funding and then approach a university to host you. Digital Humanities funding can come from all sorts of sources: academia, but also museums, galleries, the tech industry, non-profits, etc. Start googling to find even small sources of research funding from these places (you'll probably find a few grants of around $5000 or so you could apply for with your MFA or even with just your undergraduate qualifications.) If you have even a little funding, universities become very interested in associating with you, and then once you are in the door, you'll find more opportunities crop up.

On the volunteer opportunities front, maybe contact the http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/about team & offer your services? More generally . . . You don't need a formal academic affiliation to learn cool stuff, and reading about what you're interested in when you're interested in it might be more fun, anyway. But if you want to get paid, you need to be making, teaching, or organizing something; simply knowing cool ideas is not enough. You might find it useful to contemplate what exactly you want to make, if it isn't academic articles.

Can you code? I'm in a Digital Humanities group at a university (not in the USA), and the only sorts of people we employ in paid positions who aren't enrolled as a student of some sort are programmers, really. We have lots of academic people wanting to do the creative, planning, and writing sides of projects, but not so many who want to do the technical stuff (even though most of us could if we had to). So sometimes projects have some funding set aside to hire technicians. Usually we search among our own grad students for these roles, because we want to give them a hand if they need the money, but we would definitely consider an enthusiastic non-student with a background like yours. The way to connect with groups would be to go to events where they are represented, and just get to know people. Print business cards. Try unconferences and hackathons for DH people, as much as academic conferences. If you happen to be in Australia in early July, the global Digital Humanities conference is happening in Sydney, and that would be a great place to network.

Have you considered academic librarianship? (Ha! I see you've http://ask.metafilter.com/273188/Let-Me-Gladly-Google-That-For-You.) There are librarian roles (sometimes called research librarian, subject librarian, reference librarian) that focus on the tasks of gathering sources and developing broad (but sometimes shallow) knowledge and expertise. Developing that breadth frequently requires, as you put it, "getting lost in a research warren." But rather than writing it all up in an academic paper (which some do, sometimes but less commonly as a co-author), the professional charge is to deliver the overview and supporting sources to the researcher and maintain institutional access to those sources. Academic positions can run the gamut from project to project, depending on a particular scholar or group's needs: from "lackey" to "co-author" (but there's a lot of institutional variation there). It has the advantage that a position is tied to the institution (salaried by the library, sometimes tenure-track eligible if you DO want to publish) rather than any particular project (and the associated funding vagaries). Most academic positions require, however, a master's (MLS, MLIS, MIS) http://www.ala.org/accreditedprograms/directory.

Seconding "technically-skilled lab position," if you have (or can learn) relevant skills. I lucked into an absolutely wonderful job when I noped out of my Ph.D program -- I build hardware and write software in support of research at a lab I believe in. These were always the parts of academia I enjoyed, and now I make a decent living and know I'm supporting research I believe in. I found the gig because a then-colleague of mine met my now-boss at a conference, became Facebook friends with him, and let me know about a job opening he mentioned there. The trick is that a lot of these positions go direct to graduate research assistants, who are cheaper than experienced engineering talent and can do "good enough" for a lot of research support. You need to find a place that knows it needs skill and time of a kind that a straight GRA can't provide reliably, and then have that skill ready to go. In my case, the circumstances involved tight-timeline software development in support of a relatively big-money grant to the lab, so they were able to hire on software developers and other support staff. No idea how you get lucky enough to find such an opening and get in, aside from networking like whoa. Most of my other staff colleagues graduated from the same university and got involved with this lab as undergraduates or masters students, then transitioned to full-time after graduating. So, attend conferences and panels, work on picking up related skills to the kind of gig you want; be ready to work hard and make yourself indispensable?

Grant writing, perhaps?

Given this field you're interested in, you can just show up at a university research lab event or something and volunteer, and then work your way up hopefully. this is still far from getting a paid job there and very much farther from getting any kind of visa out of it, but most places doing this kind of research are happy to use the free labor even from people they don't know.

There's a growing movement that intersects with some of the disciplines you mentioned (e.g. digital humanities, new media) to go "http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/cluster/beyond-dissertation-1." You might want to see if there are academic departments where you could get a phd without writing a traditional dissertation. The degree opens a lot of doors. Or learn to code as suggested above. That will give you a huge leg up and make you very valuable to research teams in your area of interest.

To add on to that, it may be worth exploring why you don't want to write. Many academics don't enjoy writing. You would not be alone. And like NoDef says it's really a cornerstone of actually doing research - being able to communicate what you've done makes it useful. Researching and pursuing knowledge because it's fun is all fine and good but sharing it is where things really get interesting. Daily writing practice may help you learn to dislike it less and make it less emotional. Writing is not emotional. It's just communicating. The book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1452203865/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/ is very helpful for this. There's also nothing wrong with trying to get a PhD and deciding it's not for you. You sound like many of the doctoral students I know. Why not give it a shot? You can always go do something else if you decide it's not your bag.